Some people already submitted this news last week, but it wasn't until today that it became official: the FreeBSD team has announced the release of FreeBSD version 9.0. As you may expect from the major version number change, this is releas eis packed with new stuff.

And yet another major Android vendor will pay protection money to Microsoft. "Microsoft and LG Electronics have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for LG's tablets, mobile phones and other consumer devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. The contents of the agreement have not been disclosed." You know your technology sector is terminally ill when this sort of bullshit is considered normal.

"Raspberry Pis started being made a couple of days ago, but I was forbidden to tell you about it until signed contracts and receipts for payment had arrived - it's been killing me, especially since I've had tens of you asking me when manufacturing would start every day for the last few weeks. I am not good at keeping secrets." No more secrets to keep, Liz! I can't wait to place my order.

The latest blog entry from Steven Sinofsky about Windows 8 describes the Storage Spaces functionality . From the blog entry it seems Windows 8 is getting something ZFS-like. The Storage Spaces can be created in the command line via Powershell, or in the Control Panel for the ones that prefer a more mouse-friendly interface.

According to a new report from research firm NPD, iOS’s U.S. market share (by sales) jumped from 26% in the third quarter of 2011 to 43% by October and November. Android, however, came out on top, with 47% market share during those two months, down from 60% in Q3.

Two years hence, Oracle's stewardship of Java continues to raise user and vendor ire, this time due to modularization, licensing, and security concerns. 'Plans for version 8 of Java Platform Standard Edition, which is due next year, call for inclusion of Project Jigsaw to add modular capabilities to Java. But some organizations are concerned with how Oracle's plans might conflict with the OSGi module system already geared to Java. In the licensing arena, Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu Linux, says Oracle is no longer letting Linux distributors redistribute Oracle's own commercial Java, causing difficulties for the company. Meanwhile, security vendor F-Secure views Java as security hindrance.'

An OS Enthusiast created a page displaying the modal restart prompts from many of the top OSes/versions from the last 20 years. It brought back a flood of memories. The best part is when you click on the "ok" button. It "restarts" the web site for you. Gizmodo's instincts were to make it a game, by asking: how many can you identify?

On Tuesday 10th January, Donald Ervin Knuth, the American computing pioneer and author of the classic The Art of Computer Programming, celebrates his 74th birthday. Four years ago, Knuth set aside a couple of days to record, in great depth, the story of his life and work for posterity. You can watch the recording here.

Somewhere in 2001, I bought a computer magazine which came with a Linux CD. I had heard of Linux before, but while we did have broadband back then and was technically capable of downloading a Linux distribution, this method was far easier. This was my first foray into Linux - it was Mandrake. Now, though, it seems the curtain has really dropped for the French Linux company.

"Canonical is indeed bringing a TV to CES. But it's not about hardware just yet: Ubuntu TV is a brand new derivitave of Ubuntu, with a full-in TV-optimized UI inspired by Unity, and full-on media center and DVR features. There's a movie, TV and music store, a YouTube app, and of course it's all optimized for a lean-back remote experience. The software will be free for manufacturers to package with their TVs, and Ubuntu says there will be TVs on shelves by the end of the year."

Linux 3.2 has been released . The changes include support for Ext4 block sizes bigger than 4KB and up to 1MB, btrfs has been updated with faster scrubbing, automatic backup of critical filesystem metadata, detailed corruption messages and tools for manual inspection of the metadata; the process scheduler has added support to set upper limits of CPU time usage to groups of processes; the desktop reponsiveness in presence of heavy writes has been improved; TCP has been updated to include an algorithm which speeds up slightly the recovery of connection after lost packets; and more. New drivers and small improvements and fixes are also available in this release. Here's the full changelog.

Well, well, well, what have we here? Hackers have gained access to internal documents from the Indian Military (shared on the web), and in it, it is revealed that RIM, Nokia, and Apple have added backdoors to their mobile software (BlackBerry, S40 (supposedly), and iOS) which the Indian Military's intelligence service then used to spy on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (the USCC). The backdoors were added by RIM, Nokia, and Apple in exchange for Indian market presence.

And so the smartphonification of the general purpose computer continues. This time around, though, it might actually be for the better. Microsoft has detailed two new features in Windows 8: refreshing and resetting your computer. Reinstalls will be a thing of the past.

"Though a deeply divided Congress is currently considering Internet website censorship legislation, the US has no such official policy - not even for child porn, which is voluntarily blocked by some ISPs. Nor does the US have a government-backed 'three strikes' or 'graduated response' system of escalating warnings to particular users accused of downloading music and movies from file-sharing networks. Yet here was the ultimatum that the US Embassy in Madrid gave the Spanish government in February 2008: adopt such measures or we will punish you. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have the text of the diplomatic cable announcing the pressure tactics." Isn't it funny that one of the main driving forces behind the push for more stringent copyright laws, Disney, has built its empire almost entirely on appropriating European public domain stories? As a European, that's just insulting.